Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Model, sportsman, banker - banished from Egypt

What did a model, sportsman and banker have in common? They were all banished from Egypt after 1948. The story of three remarkable Egyptian Jews is among 73 told in Ada Aharoni's new book The Golden Age of the Jews of Egypt - uprooting and revival in Israel. Article in Haaretz (with thanks: Orna):

Fortuna
Cassuto (pictured), a beautiful young woman from Alexandria, Egypt, worked as the
house model at a prestigious fashion house. The plant made clothes for
Queen Farida, the wife of King Farouk, as well as luxury lines for
Egypt’s well to do.

Cassuto
was born in 1926 to a traditional Ladino-speaking Jewish family. The
Cassutos, among the Jews expelled from Spain centuries earlier,
originally lived in Jerusalem but fled to Egypt during the 1929 Arab
riots.

Fortuna
was often invited to the royal palace to display the fashion house’s
new dresses to Queen Farida. A Bentley bearing the royal family’s crest
would stop in front of her house and take her to the palace.

In
the corridors she often encountered King Farouk, who would greet her
with a nod, said her daughter, Tziona. Fortuna would wistfully recall
the days of her youth in Alexandria, a bustling European-type city with
luxury stores. She loved to walk along the Corniche, the promenade along
the beach, and listen to the singing of Farid al-Atrash and Leila
Mourad.

Thanks
to her activity in the Zionist movement Hehalutz Hatzair, Cassuto met
her future husband, from the Masri-Mishori family. They celebrated their
engagement at a performance of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Toscanini. In March 1946 they married in Alexandria’s
Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue.

On
the day the State of Israel was declared, May 14, 1948, Fortuna’s
husband was arrested; she was pregnant at the time. Every two weeks she
visited him at Abu Qir, a detention camp where Egyptian Jews were
imprisoned. She even brought the baby along.

The
child was named Tziona because of the detainees’ longing to immigrate
to Israel. She was the first baby born to a detainee at the camp.

After
a year and a half in prison Fortuna's husband was released and expelled
from Alexandria. Mother and child were waiting for him at the port;
they sailed to Haifa via Venice. The officials at Haifa port gave her a
Hebrew name. “You are beautiful (Yaffa), so that will be your name in
Israel,” one of them told her.

Yaffa,
the Egyptian Jewish model, now had to adapt to the young State of
Israel. First the family was housed in tents in Pardes Hannah, later in
the Be’er Yaakov transit camp and then on Kibbutz Yakum. To bathe the
baby, she had to walk long distances to bring pails of water to the tent
in the transit camp.

Later
on her husband became the president of the association of Egyptian Jews
in Israel. They had four children. She died in 2006; he died three
years later.

The
story of the Masri-Mishori family appears in the new book “The Golden
Age of the Jews from Egypt – Uprooting and Revival in Israel,“ edited by
Ada Aharoni, who researches the history of Egyptian Jewry.

The
book records the destruction of the Egyptian Jewish community through
the stories of 73 Egyptian Jews, who were expelled from their homeland
at the outbreak of the Israeli War of Independence.

The
book puts the number of Egyptian Jews on the eve of the expulsion at
between 65,000 and 100,000. They were among the approximately 1 million
Jews who lived in Arab countries at the outbreak of the War of
Independence. They endured terror, arrests, murders, confiscations and
expulsions.

To
their aid came Aliyah Bet, the group that organized illegal immigration
to Israel. Emissaries included Eliyahu Bracha, a native of Egypt, who
in 1949 went back to his homeland under the cover of a French sports
journalist. There he arranged visas and ships for Jews who wanted to
leave Egypt. His story appears in the new book, which describes a
chapter of Jewish history rarely detailed.

Another
key figure in the book is Guido Asher, a star of the Egyptian national
basketball team. Asher, born in 1916, began his career at the Alexandria
sports club. He later became a star of the local Maccabi team and was
invited to play for the Egyptian national team.

He
was the pride of Egypt's Jews, was the best player on the team, and was
showered with praise by the Egyptian press, wrote his son, Itzik Asher.
He led the Egyptian team to victories in the European championships.

According
to his son, Asher also sailed and rode a motorcycle; at 32 he was
killed in a motorcycle accident. “Mourning in Egyptian sports:
Basketball has lost a first-class player,” wrote a newspaper of the
period.

Meanwhile,
the tale of the Levy (Tantawi) family tells the story of wealthy
Egyptian Jews. The father, Yom Tov, was the chief executive of a bank in
Cairo and established a beit midrash (study hall) in the city’s Jewish quarter.

They
lived in Helwan, a quiet town, in a big house surrounded by a huge
garden, said his son, Pepo Levy. They lived a life of luxury with
servants and two gardeners.

The
family’s good life was cut short with the declaration of Israeli
independence. Yom Tov had to burn hundreds of letters sent to him from
Israel. In a speech to the Cairo Jewish community he warned that the
time had come to immigrate to Israel. “Apres moi le deluge,” he said.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)